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I go to Stanford, and I'm an economics major, not thinking I'm going to do anything with acting. A professor came to the dorm where I lived looking for people to audition for an August Wilson play, 'Joe Turner's Come And Gone.' I gave it a shot, got one of the lead roles in the play.
It's like, remember who you always were, where you came from, who your parents were, how they raised you. Because that authentic self is going to follow you all through life, so make sure that it's solid so it's something that you can hold on and be proud of for the rest of your life.
It's not a coincidence that the Bible starts with Genesis. Most people really want to know where we came from and where everything around us came from. I like to strongly push the scientific answer. We have evidence. We no longer have to rely on stories we were told when we were young.
After the Berlin Wall came down I visited that city and I will never forget it. The abandoned checkpoints. The sense of excitement about the future. The knowledge that a great continent was coming together. Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union.
I felt (a) it was a great role and (b) I wanted to stay in town. I wanted to stop going to these four month and five month gigs up in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver or down in Mexico. I wanted to be around my son, Max. This came along and I was like, 'I really want to play this guy!'
My real name is Bob Davis, but for some reason, I got the name Jasper while playing football at the local rec when I was nine years old, and it just stuck. Years later, when someone asked 'Jasper who?' I just said 'Carrott' - but I have no idea why I came out with that particular word.
Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, 'Why don't you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?' They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn't want to associate with their past.
With my fighters, there's no excuses like, 'Hey, listen, he's a dumb guy. Came from the mean streets of somewhere. He's just not all that bright.' These are educated guys, most of them went to college, they have families, children, etc. These are smart, rational people I'm dealing with.
The dot stands for 'detail' - always be paying attention to detail. I feel that people take you as serious as you take yourself. I spent a lot of time working on my craft, developing my style, and after I came out of my little incubation, I promised that I would pay attention to detail.
The first day of shooting came, and of course I was nervous. I would lie if I said I wasn't impressed. I mean, Lars von Trier hiring me to be the king in 'Medea'... Lars said, 'Stop! Stop!' And I was so nervous, I turned around and said, 'What is it?' He said, '... Just be a tired king.'
When we were writing the 'Stage' album, we realized we'd never really done proper covers, where we were taking songs and making them our own and kind of playing around with them. I came up with the idea of doing a cover of 'Wish You Were Here,' but we didn't really want it on the record.
My father... removed from Kentucky to... Indiana, in my eighth year... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up... Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher... but that was all.
In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.
I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It's embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.
The point of theatre is transformation: to make an extraordinary event out of ordinary material right in front of an audience's eyes. Where the germ of the idea came from is pretty much irrelevant. What matters to every theatre maker I know is speaking clearly to the audience 'right now.'
In so many ways, World War II was one of the lowest lows imaginable, yet some of my most treasured memories come from that time. Communities came together, people displayed a wonderful generosity of spirit and I saw the bravery of our boys on the front line as they fought for our freedom.
My friend and I founded the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival to counter the negative images of Arabs in media. And we always made sure that the comedy came first. So we weren't a bunch of Arabs trying to be funny. We were a bunch of comedians who just happened to be of Arab heritage.
Where I came from, the idea of going into show business was just ridiculous; in fact I didn't tell anybody because I knew people would laugh at me. So I sort of snuck around and got some pictures and got a resume together and, of course, lied and said I did all kinds of things I didn't do.
I remember when I first came out as an artist, back in 2004 or 2005, the record label used to take me to all the radio stations and just have me sit in, like, their lunchroom or their conference room, and play for the whole staff. Just to introduce them to me so they would play my records.
I remember when I first came out on tour, it was Greg Norman and Nick Price. We forget how big Norman was, what a presence he was. I remember one of my first tournaments, Greg threw an orange peel down on the ground and some fan ran over and grabbed it. 'This is Greg Norman's orange peel!'
I enjoy the celebration of my birthday as much as anyone else does, but I always remember to start my day thanking my mom because she did most of the work the day I came into the world, not to mention all she has done throughout my life that has contributed so much to the woman I am today.
I grew up listening to the Beatles and being an ardent Beatles fan when I was in third grade all the way to adulthood, and listening to all kinds of music that came to us either at the flea market or in our living rooms or on the 'Ed Sullivan' show - all these places we were influenced by.
A country that cannot feed itself cannot have self-pride, and in the mid-'60s 20 percent of all the wheat produced in America came into India. We were agriculturally a basket case. And 15 years later, 20 years later, we have become an agricultural power. This is the famous Green Revolution.
You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There's not one part that He doesn't want to make completely whole.
I came here from Romania when I was 12 years old. I had an accent. High school was tough a little bit for a few years. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be good-looking. I wanted to be popular. I spent a lot of time thinking, 'What are these people going to think of me?'
What I mean is that none of my talents had a - what's that great word - rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer - there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I'm a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do.
I was 20, and my reality was that people either went to college full-time, or they were draftable. The dear friends that I went to high school with that didn't go to college eventually wound up in Vietnam, and I noticed that they came home different. I was in Ohio during the Vietnam War era.
You fight, you try your best, but if you lose, you don't have to break five racquets and smash up the locker room. You can do those things, but when you've finished, nothing's changed. You've still lost. If something positive came from that, I probably would do it. But I see only negativity.
When I was a vocalist, a lead singer in a rock band, I was a law student at the time. It wasn't a professional rock band, it was for fun. I was already way out of that by the time Phantom came along. Having to learn to sing, it was such duress, having to really try and get to such a quality.
My martial arts came a lot from my uncle, who actually taught martial arts through the military. He was a black belt in tae kwon do, but also, he used a lot of military-style fighting where it's not the high kicks or anything like that. It's basically defeat your opponent as fast as possible.
Everything that has happened to me in my life has defined who I am, and all of the things leading up to being governor, that all came from overcoming challenges in childhood and overcoming challenges as I got older. When you have God, you quickly understand there's nothing you can't overcome.
I grew up on the rough side of the tracks. If you looked like you were soft, you would be fodder for the wolves. I came up in my neighbourhood like, 'I'm just gonna be me,' and all the thugs just said, 'It's OK, he's special.' They knew I had the talent with the rhymes, so they kept me around.
Our trademark asymmetrical hairstyle came about by accident. My sister was trying to get her beautician's licence, and I was her guinea pig. She permed my hair and didn't wash out one of the sides properly, so the whole right side of my hair was eaten out. After she washed it, I was half bald.
I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.
Good food and a warm kitchen are what makes a house a home. I always tried to make my home like my mother's, because Mom was magnificent at stretching a buck when it came to decorating and food. Like a true Italian, she valued beautification in every area of her life, and I try to do the same.
When I was about 12, I came home from middle school and told my parents I wanted to be an actor. My father didn't say it to me, but he told my mom, 'No. I'm not going to allow that. He'll starve to death.' I grew up in a small town in Illinois where being an actor was not something people did.
We danced on the lip of the volcano, so to speak. We were young, too. And New York was still a big, open city where anything could happen and anyone could be star. Rents were cheap, creativity was encouraged, and bottle service was still 20 years away. That was the era the Club Kids came into.
I was born in Faridabad but brought up in Delhi and Mumbai. My father had been living hand-to-mouth and literally slept on railway platforms when he came to Mumbai for the first time to become a film singer. My parents were both singers; they sang together and fell in love due to their singing.
As I started to explore my gender identity, I didn't know how I could claim the title of 'feminist' without subscribing to the gender binary. I thought I had to be a proud woman to be a feminist. Then I came to the realization that I can be proud of women without necessarily identifying as one.
An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in. Microsoft started with programming tools, but came out with an operating system. Oracle started doing contracts for the CIA. AOL started out as an online video gaming network.
When I first came to NBC, I thought it was going to be swimming with the sharks, all men for themselves, be careful and all that. I have to tell you I learned that you can be kind and a hard worker and move up. You don't have to play dirty or do things that you think happens at big corporations.
Straight edge came out of the hardcore scene. I don't necessarily believe, as some people believe, that you have to be a part of the hardcore scene to share that philosophy and stance against recreational drug use. But it is where it came from, and it is where it influenced me to be a part of it.
Regarding my pay, my salary, that I don't 'earn a lot,' these are things that are a result of two years ago when I came to Inter. To me, it was a good contract for having arrived at Inter. I signed the contract with the excitement and desire to prove my worth and be an important player for Inter.
Before this country came on the scene, for thousands of years people did things the same way. Within 200 years of the advent of this nation, men were walking on the moon, and I want us to recognize this is the kind of people that we are. We're creative with a lot of ingenuity and a lot of energy.
When TV came, people said who will go to theatres to watch movies? When the Internet came, they said the same. And now it's the digital media... The doomsday predictions are always there but I don't think people will stop going to cinema halls because that is one experience you can't get at home.
The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.
The bracelet says 'Fear Nothing.' It was given to me by my friends, and it was made for me and my friends during the period of time that I was going through chemotherapy. And I still wear it, because it's a great reminder of friendship and how my buddies and others came together in my time of need.
There was years when my father didn't even make a hundred grand - or barely made a hundred grand - and sure, we had a maid, but she only came twice a week. What do you think happened the other five days? You think those dishes washed themselves? You think those clothes got themselves in the hamper?
We are a total of our sum parts, right? I came from a family of very strong women - black women. And if I go back as far as my great grandmothers, there was always that love and the ability to be nurturing. Then I grew up in a household where my father was the one who was more affectionate with me.
When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.